


Flawed

by Tammaiya



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-04-09
Updated: 2004-04-09
Packaged: 2018-08-09 13:14:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7803367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammaiya/pseuds/Tammaiya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a very fine line between genius and insanity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flawed

Trembling, the child stared at his father, light frame heaving with choking sobs. He is only twelve, yet the last ten minutes have matured him far beyond most twenty-year-olds. In a way, he’s older now than some people ever will be.  
  
There are always children who are going to be emotionally unstable; those are the children who grow up to be either brilliant or insane, he’s been told. He’s sometimes good at his homework, when he does it, and he thinks maybe he could have been brilliant, in another life. He’s not, though, and he never will be, because he’s heading down the path of insanity, and he’s going to Hell in a handbasket.  
  
His father and mother were muggles, and that’s never a good place to start. He didn’t know he was a wizard, and evidently neither did the kids at school. He was privately sure that things would have been different if they had, because he knows that bullies are cowards. The counsellor told him so. They didn’t, though, so he grew up having his face shoved into mud and his hair yanked on, having his lunch money stolen just so they wouldn’t beat him up after school but it never stopped them anyway. Nerd was the worst thing to be branded with, nerd and freak and loner, and he was all three.  
  
His father is an alcoholic and a workaholic and his mother is histrionic and he hates words that end in -olic or -onic. Daddy’s never home, but he’s glad because when he is he’s drunk and he shouts and mummy cries. He hid behind a book whenever that happened.  
  
Daddy called him a useless little shit when he was drunk. Mummy shrieked at him and threw a book. Stop reading! Why can’t you be a normal child? GO TO BED.  
  
He didn’t feel like telling mummy that it was an hour before he usually went to bed.  
  
By the time he was eight, he’d learnt that turning the music up loud would drown out the fights, and began his quest to detach himself from his surroundings. He asked for a discman for his ninth birthday, and daddy gave it to him just to spite mummy. After that he was always isolated in a world of his own, listening to his CDs and reading fantasy books.  
  
Mummy left when he was ten, and he hated her for escaping and leaving him there, leaving him at a school he didn’t like, in a house with a father he hated, in a life where he had no one to cling to. He thinks maybe he could have loved mummy, just like he could have been brilliant, but he’s not sure. He wonders if maybe he could have loved his parents the way they were before he was born. He’s seen photos, and daddy is always smiling.  
  
Daddy never smiles. Daddy is always angry.  
  
When strange things start to happen around him, the kids intensify their teasing. You’re a freak, they tell him. Weird stuff happens near you ‘cause you’re weird.  
  
He gets the letter to attend Hogwarts on his eleventh birthday, and at first he thinks that it’s a horrible practical joke being played on him. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s been the victim of nasty pranks, but nothing quite like this has ever happened to him before. As the date draws nearer, though, he starts to wonder if maybe it’s true. Maybe that’s why he’s a freak?  
  
He knows that the boys at his school would call him a freak anyway, but it’s comforting to know that being a freak doesn’t have to be a bad thing. He starts to let himself hope that he really will be a wizard, and that now things will be different. He loves his fantasy books, and he loves the idea that maybe he’s finally going to a place where he will fit in.  
  
He’s sorted into Slytherin, and he knows he could be brilliant, really, but Hogwarts is no different from his muggle school when it counts. His housemates mock him and call him a mudblood, beat him up and lock him out and play nasty tricks on him; people roll their eyes when he doesn’t know what something so basic as ‘Quidditch’ is, and even his nicer year mates think he’s weird. Even among wizards he’s a freak- see how he isolates himself? What a strange boy.   
  
The sorting hat almost put him in Ravenclaw, and he wonders if things would have been different if it had- he's sure that Ravenclaw is a much safer place to be, for a mudblood. He puts up with the bullying for the whole of first year, but being in Slytherin only gets worse. His housemates get more vicious as they get older, he thinks, and some of the pranks they play start to get dangerous. He’s sick of waking up to see Madam Pomfrey, and he’s sick of putting up with being treated like a moving target, so one day he goes ballistic. He puts one of the other Slytherins in the infirmary. After that they treat him with a grudging respect, but he’s still an outcast. He always will be.  
  
He’s destined never to fit in anywhere, he thinks, but he thinks maybe if he’s brilliant it won’t matter. He doesn’t know if there’s a law against being brilliant and insane, but it should be okay to be a brilliant freak. He’s not really insane, not yet.  
He listens in class and he’s always attentive, always quiet and absorbing everything his professors do. He can tell that even they are disturbed by him. An older student told him, at some point, that teachers are afraid of students who listen and don’t say anything. He doesn’t want to participate, though; he’s afraid of voicing his opinions, and so he just listens and thinks about it. He thinks about his classes in great detail, but his musings are never voiced. He has no friends.  
  
His father is afraid of him, now. He can see the look of fear and disgust in his father’s eyes whenever he brings out his wand, and sometimes when his father yells at him it is impossibly tempting to try a nasty hex. He knows that he will get in trouble if he does, though, and maybe he doesn’t fit into Hogwarts either, but it’s better than being expelled. If he gets expelled, he will have nowhere left to go.  
  
His father is still an alcoholic, and the boy hates summer holidays above all else. He rather likes classes, and the homework is tolerable, so no holiday at all would be preferable to the long months in his father’s company. His father is always drunk; his father is always yelling at him.  
  
He feels that his father always pushes him too far. He remembers that once as a child he picked up one of the kitchen knives and threatened his father with it; he was out of control, and he knows that he’s going to go insane one day. It’s only a matter of time.  
  
He would have stabbed his father, he is sure, but his mother wrestled the knife from his hand. He calmed down shortly after.

He’s emotionally unstable, and it’s never wise to push a flawed child too far. You never know when they’ll snap.  
  
The wand falls from nerveless fingers.  
  
“I didn’t mean it,” he says dully, staring at the corpse of his father as it lies on the floor. “Really.”  
  
But a part of him knows that he did, just for that one second, enough for it to have an effect. For Avada Kedavra to work, you’ve got to have the passion, he recalls. It was in one of his textbooks.  
  
He thinks maybe he did love his father after all, but it’s too late now. He wonders if it’s possible to cast the Killing Curse on yourself, but he thinks not. It’s probably like trying to choke yourself; not only futile, but you wake up in pain afterwards.   
  
That is, if one could even cast the spell in the first place.  
  
Rocking back on his heels, Severus waits patiently for the Dementors to take him to Azkaban.


End file.
